Why merchants have to do the heavy lifting

While it should be obvious by now to web retailers of all sizes, customers will leave or ignore entirely an e-commerce site that doesn’t make it quick and easy for them to shop, a pair of researchers told attendees Tuesday at the Shop.org 2005 Annual Summit in Las Vegas.

Speaking at a session entitled “What Research and Researchers Say Customers Really Want" Patty Freeman Evans, a retail analyst with Jupiter Research, told attendees that the basics of giving customers a meaningful shopping experience include making it easy for them to shop, giving them ample time and ways to reach a buying decision, motivating shoppers to buy with perks such as free shipping and making order placement secure.

In fact, Evans says a recent Jupiter survey of about 2,100 U.S. Internet users reveals that 32% of users taking part in the study rate having products organized in a timely manner as their top priority when visiting a shopping site, compared with 31% who say the ability to navigate by category is extremely important and 30% who want comprehensive and useful search tools.

Other important site tools and features that customers rate as being key in their decision to stay and shop a web store are the ability to refine search results by product attributes (32%); the ability to check out without registering with the site (29%); multiple product pictures (22%); the ability to save items in a shopping cart for later referral (21%); and product comparison tools (21%). “These are the mainstays of usability,” Evans says.

To improve conversion rates and get a better handle on why customers leave and go to another site, Evans also says that web retailers need to pay attention to the main reasons accounting for shopping cart abandonment and take corrective steps.

In the same Jupiter survey, 30% of the Internet users polled abandoned items in their shopping cart because they weren’t motivated or ready to make a final purchase, while another 29% also said exorbitant shipping and handling fees were the key factor in why they ended the ordering process before clicking on the buy now button.

Customers want retailers to post their shipping and handling charges on a prominent position on the web site or make it easy to find, according to an August study of more than 7,700 web shoppers and their visitor sessions by Shopzilla Inc. and BizRate.com. But shipping related issues account for almost two-thirds (60%) of all reasons mentioned by online shoppers as to why they abandon the shopping cart. Those who abandon their shopping due to shipping issues are significantly less likely to return to the same site, says Shopzilla Chairman Chuck Davis.

To make improvements in site performance and retain more shoppers, Evans and Davis cited BestBuy.com and iTunes.com as two retail sites with good shipping and tax calculation tools.